Positive Interference: The Audacity to Create a Better Future with Eco Poet, Erin Robertson

What happens when we take action toward a better future? We could end up sending ripples of "buoyant hope" and "positive interference" into the world. In this episode of The Heart Path Podcast, we talk with Eco Poet, Biologist, and Nature Writing Facilitator, Erin Robertson, about land partnerships, climate change, fire, and the resiliency of humanity when faced with the unknown. 

Erin Robertson is the author of What the River May Bring:  Impressions of Interior Alaska and the forthcoming Singed Seeds:  A Marshall Fire Year.  In 2017, Erin founded BoCo Wild Writers, her outdoor nature writing class offerings. Her poetry has been published in the North American Review, Cold Mountain Review, Poet Lore, Deep Wild, and elsewhere, and has been performed by Ars Nova Singers and The Crossing choir. She is the current Writer-in-Residence for Friends of Coal Creek, and past honors include being a guest artist hosted by the U.S. Consulate in Kazakhstan, Voices of the Wilderness Artist in Residence at Koyukuk National Wildlife Refuge in Galena, Alaska, Boulder County Artist in Residence at Caribou Ranch, and awards in the Front Range Book Prize, Michael Adams Poetry Prize, and Columbine Poets Members' Contest. Erin earned her Master of Science in Museum and Field Studies from the University of Colorado studying botany and environmental interpretation, and worked as a conservation biologist advocating for endangered species in the Rocky Mountain West for nine years. Her remarkable husband, two sons, parakeet, and pup teach her about wonder every day. Website: erinrobertson.org, wildwriters.org.  Instagram, Facebook:  @bocowildwriters

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Heartpath Podcast. I'm your host, Yvonne Ellis. The Heartpath Podcast spotlights authors, change makers, nature lovers, and creators of all kinds. Each of our podcasts aimed to share interviews and stories of beauty, resilience, and inspiration for all the questions.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Thank you so much for joining me on the HeartPath podcast. It's so good to have you here. And today I would love to hear about your new book, What the River May Bring, Impressions of Interior Alaska, and anything else that you've been up to lately. Can we start with the book?

SPEAKER_00 0:57

You bet. I'm so happy to be here with you, and I'm so looking forward to seeing where our conversation takes us to. This is my first book of poetry, and it's based on my artist's residency in Galena, Alaska, in a program called Voices of the Wilderness, which is this amazing interagency program where you can submit one application that goes to, I think when I submitted it, it was going to like 26 different federal lands in Alaska. So it's a combination of National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service wilderness areas. And then you can be an artist in residence and you are paired with a wilderness specialist who works in that area. And you get to work alongside them and also practice your art. And then at the end of your term, within the next six months, you put on a public program, either where you did the residency or at home or both. And you also gift your host agency a piece of your art. So these are poems that I wrote during my two-week residency at Kayakuk National Wildlife Refuge, which is in the interior of Alaska on the Yukon River. And when I went there, I had this idea to try to write a secular book of hours, which were medieval personal prayer books that had prayers for each part of the day. So even though I was there a relatively short amount of time, I have a nice body of work from the experience. And now it's a book. Wonderful. Can we hear a poem from the book? Yeah, this is my favorite poem in here. And it's the poem that I gifted the service. So this is hanging in the offices in Galena now. A friend of mine illustrated it with some watercolor. And usually when you provide these gifts to the agency, you're not really able to use them yourself again. But when this manuscript was accepted for publication, I wrote The Voices of the Wilderness folks and said, Well, this is happening. Would you want a record of cranes to be in it? And they said, Yes, please. So it's so nice that they kind of donated it back to be included with the rest of the poems. A record of cranes. Twice today I tried to record them for you. This last time the loon side too, but there's no sound when I press play, though you would hear them plainly here in the tent with me. You will have to trust it is a wild, desperate, unhinged cackle, laughter calling. One voice, then many, rolling in waves across the lake. Then the loon offers its high lonesome wail, rippling across the water, saying the unsayable, wringing the air with loss. The gnats tap dance across the tent ceiling, and I have only one day left in this wilderness it took a lifetime to enter. Then there's the long journey home. Four planes, two time zones, and a chunk of reality away. Things will go on. I will fold laundry. The cranes will dance. The young moon will leave its parents protection. The sands will continue their slow roll southeast. The forest will burn again. All this flesh will turn to bone. And what can be done about any of it? Except I can tell you about the call of the cranes tonight. Yes, yes. What can be done about any of it?

SPEAKER_02 5:07

Yeah. Except for just being there with it, right? That's it. I think that's the best way to be right now. And I would love to know what you did when you were hanging out with the wilderness specialist.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Yeah. So I was paired with Karen Badoni, which interestingly, she grew up in Colcree Canyon. So I've been able to see her several times since then and hang out with her parents too, even though her life is so far away in the Alaskan interior. And she was interested in hosting me partly because I had a background in plant ecology and she was doing some plant ecology fieldwork. So that was amazing to be working side by side with a biologist who I'm embedded with and can ask questions of all the time. Because otherwise, I think it can be hard to write with any authority in a place that you're just getting to know, which of course is still the case there. But the fact that I could ask her constantly, what's this? What's that? How do these things interact? was just amazing for me. I'm a biologist by training, by background. So one of the main parts of our field work that we were working on was we went to the Nogahabara dunes, which is this inland sand dune field, like we have Sand Dunes National Park here in Colorado. And uh there is this forest along the fringe that had undergone a pretty serious fire. So they had satellite data about the severity of the burn in different areas, but they wanted to ground truth that with us down on the ground taking soil samples and doing little floristic inventories in different patches of different severity fire levels to make sure that they were really being able to gauge what had happened from the satellite imagery alone. I don't know if you've been out in burned forest before, but I also was able to go up in the plane with John Fielder, who's a landscape photographer here in Colorado, to fly over the Heyman fire, which I think that was maybe 2002, but it was the largest fire in Colorado history at the time. And even that fire, it's so patchy, the effects on the ground. It can be really surprising how just a few meters away things are relatively normal and then things are totally burned nearby. And we did see that on the ground as well.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

Yeah, it's really interesting how fire chooses to move through a landscape. And there was this huge fire that was right by the lookout that I was working in, and it was called the bootleg, and the bootleg made its own weather, and so there was a tornado that happened in South Central Oregon from this fire, and there was a pyrotechnic storm that happened from the fire. And so looking at where that is now, seeing what grows back and what kind of just stays the same is really interesting because it shows where that heat was really centered and where the fuels were burning even hotter. There were smokes everywhere. Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is the fear that people have of fire. Yeah. And how interesting that is because our ancestors lived by fire. We wouldn't even be here right now if it weren't for the stoves that fire powered and the warmth of fire and everything that we've gathered from fire. And now there's this like innate fear. And I've been trying lately to think of ways to build a bridge between that fear and an understanding of how we still need healthy fire, or else we're gonna end up with a lot more damage. And so that's just been on my heart and mind. But did you think of that at all when you were in Alaska?

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Well, my main experience of the fire of late is the Marshall Fire here in Boulder County. So I live in Louisville, Colorado, and the Marshall Fire burned a thousand homes in Louisville and Superior. So this is my own town, my own neighborhood. And this is a grass fire that got into suburbia and just one home to the next started burning. And it was an extreme wind event, you know, winds over 80 miles an hour. And so I actually have a manuscript about that too, called Singed Seeds, a Marshall Fire Year, that received the Runner Up Award for the Front Range Book Prize this year. And then it's been accepted for publication by alternating current press, which puts on that contest. So that should be coming out within the next year. After the Marshall Fire burned, there was a small fire at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the forest around there. And that was a much more natural, controllable, ecologically healthy fire. So I did write a poem contrasting the NCAR fire and the Marshall fire, which just felt so apocalyptic at the time. So yeah, we're we're just in this interesting new relationship with fire. You know, you talked about having to have your smoke map, right? When I was in Alaska, they would have smoke forecasts. I heard that you worked at Denali, so maybe you had that experience there too. But now, you know, I have bookmarked on my phone the smoke map for here so that I have an idea of what things are going to be like for my outdoor classes. And I have the watch duty app on my phone so that the next time I see smoke, I can quickly look. Is this prescribed or is it a wildfire? Because it's just become part of our everyday experience now in Colorado. I've lived here for 30 years. So, you know, I think I lived here, I don't know, maybe 15 years before there was a wildfire that even made it into my consciousness because things were different.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Yeah. Can we just go into that a little bit? How you think things have changed in the last 15 years?

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Yeah, well, I mean, especially 2020 when we had one fire after another here, and the sun was salmon-colored for months. You know, Colorado has this reputation for being a healthy place to go and live. You know, this history of the sanitariums for tuberculosis patients, people would come to Colorado for asthma, and then suddenly our air quality being terrible for months, not just from the fires here, but fires in California, fires in Canada, just really affecting our bluebird skies. And thinking about, you know, these extreme weather events that my children are growing up with that I did not have to, you know, we have red flag warnings now, letting us know fire danger is really extreme. These things like derechos and bomb cyclones, these are not words that were in my vocabulary until the last decade. So I was talking with my students about this recently, saying, I'm 52 years old. I feel like I should have more and more wisdom about natural cycles and the environment around me. But I feel like as things are becoming destabilized, I feel less and less certain about reading the landscape and knowing what's going to come next seasonally and everything. Is this the first time, you know, in human history that people are feeling that way? Where as you age, you become less in tune with what's going to happen next in the world around you, in terms of natural cycles. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

I love that you brought that up. And I don't know. I feel like every year it is different. And even living here in Mount Shester for a few years, it's been different every year. So I don't know what normal is anymore. But I'm glad that we can sit with it and be with it like everything else, right? Right.

unknown 14:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

So can we talk a little bit about Boco Wild Riders and how you created that and the story of that?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Sure. Um, yeah, so it's Boco for Boulder County or Boulder, Colorado. When I started it up, there was a guy in Portland, Oregon who was doing some adult workshops, occasionally called Wild Riders. And I reached out to him and said, Can I use this name for this class I want to start? He's like, Why don't you add a word to it? So that's why I asked the BOCO. But it was also partly inspired by a class that Jack Collum used to teach through Thorn Nature Association. He was a professor at Naropa here in Boulder and from the beet poet lineage. But he would take kids out in the summer and through Thorns, teach poetry outside, and he called it Wild Words. So when I first moved to Colorado, I volunteered as a teaching assistant with Thorne as a way to get to know the ecology and meet other nature educators. And I was lucky enough to be paired with him for a session and just loved it so much. I then went on to grad school and become a biologist and work for nine years in conservation. And then when I had my second son, I stopped working and I stayed home with my two kids for quite a while. And then when my youngest was in full-time school, I thought, okay, so now what do I want to do? I was a little burnt out from advocacy because I had done almost all of that under the George W. Bush administration, which was not friendly at all to endangered species, which was our focus. So I kind of thought I've done that time in the trenches. I like to do something that just brings me joy. And so I thought I could maybe just start a forest kindergarten, or I could try to teach a class like that class Jack used to lead. And so I talked to some friends who were homeschoolers because that's another thing. I had a friend who was leading a class called Science Adventure Program that was after school and in the summers, which makes sense, you know, based on how we live our lives. But that's exactly when I wanted to be home with my kids. So I thought, well, maybe I could teach something for homeschoolers, and that would give me a longer block of time than I would get in the classroom and we could be outside. So I talked to some homeschooling families, and they said we would be really interested in a writing class because we like doing nature appreciation stuff as a family, but it's hard to get our kids to write. So I started that in 2017, and it's just been so wonderful. So this spring I have 11 students ages nine to 14, and we meet Tuesdays from 10 to 3 at different trailheads around the county, and we make an anthology after each semester. They're all on our website, wildriders.org, if you ever want to peek at what we've been writing. And yeah, it's wonderful. I get to be out on the trails and surprised by nature. Because we sit still long enough, animals come out for us, and it's just great being with young people, of course.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

That sounds wonderful. Nice work finding your work in this world. I love that. So is that what you do full-time?

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Or well, I'm also a poet, so I have some gigs, and I'm actively writing in a couple of critique groups, and so really writing and teaching writing is my full-time work. Yeah. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 18:31

That sounds so good and fulfilling. So you have an anthology that you were just published in. Is that correct? In the Cole Creek anthology? Is that what it's called?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Right. So I'm the current writer in residence for Friends of Cole Creek, which is my local watershed conservation group. And I also had signed up with a program called Writing the Land that Lise McLaughlin puts together. And writing the land pairs poets and land trusts. And then the poets write at least three poems for the land trust. And then she compiles these anthologies that then the land trusts can sell to make a profit to raise money for their organizations. So our chapter just came out in the latest anthology called Writing the Land Pathways. So we have a few pages where we get to talk about the work of the conservation group. And I think I've got eight poems in here that I wrote by the Creek, inspired by the Greek. And then it can be a fundraiser for the group.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

I love that everything is rippling. All the work that you do seems to ripple out in the world. So thank you for the way that you share with the world, Erin. I would love to hear a poem from the anthology if you'd like to share.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Sure. So one of the things that Friends of Cold Creek is doing is harvesting native seed and then providing that at different uh public events. So this is something that I wrote when I saw kids taking handfuls of milkweed seed from their booth at I think this was like a Halloween event, and arcing the seed into the sky. Letting go of milkweed seed. Great drifts of white webs of soft silk studded with copper coins that might just split and grow, scooped from bumpy dried boats. The children reach elbow deep into a horde of possibility, then rainbow a white cloud into the waiting air. And now the sky above us all is alive with buoyant hope. Next year's sustenance for monarchs wafting aloft, ready for a new bit of earth to spill milky stars from next spring.

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Wow. The imagery is just popping in this poem. What really stuck with me was buoyant hope. Are there ways that you practice buoyant hope these days?

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Yeah. Well, you know, my training working on endangered species issues under the Bush administration allowed me to exercise that a lot. And my first week on the job, my boss took me out to this Chinese restaurant, and the fortune that I got said, despair is criminal. So I had that little fortune on my keyboard the whole nine years that I worked at that job. And then afterwards, my co worker. When I was leaving, they made a book for me, you know, with a lot of photos from our projects and quotes from co-workers about my work and everything. It was very moving. They stole the fortune off of my desk and taped it into the front of that book. So that has really been a guiding belief of mine that, you know, I'm an activist at heart. Um, I also just went yesterday to the conference on world affairs at CU, and the last talk we went to was called, so you're saying there's a chance building a brighter future for the world. And at the end of that, my students and I were talking, and I was like, I just feel like the best part about what we heard was this permission to feel optimism right now. You know, I feel like a lot of messages in society are like, if you have any optimism right now, you're not paying attention. But we can just get paralyzed if we sink into despair and don't have the creativity and the audacity to envision a better future. And, you know, I have two boys of my own who I want a better world for. And I just feel like I have to live that for them too, this belief that you can make a difference. That as you're talking about the rippling of our little efforts, I have a poem called Positive Interference. Yeah. Positive interference. One foot in the creek and one on earth, sun and cottonwoods waver with sky, the little disturbance of me rippling out, changing the course of one leaf's fate. The same way water changes me, cooled, sleek, glistening, ears filled with the reassuring constancy of downstream flow. Things come to rest where they ought until the next storm reorganizes all.

SPEAKER_02 24:09

Yes, yes. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 24:13

Yeah, so I think like, what else are we here for if not to try to make it a better place, right?

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Yeah, I figure we're all here for some reason. We may as well make the most of it.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Yes. Yeah, why not? Well, and we also went to this talk yesterday where Asher J was really inspiring, and she was talking about like, I'm just so excited to see all of you in the audience, you beings of light, and how exciting it is that we can think about what we could all do together, you know, just this energy of we're here on the planet at the same time, just like you and I, Yvonne. I feel very privileged to be able to talk with you and get a little bit of your experience too, and the way that you're connecting people through this podcast. So, yeah, what can we do together is a really exciting, energizing question, too.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

Yes, please. Thank you for bringing that up. I love that question. And I actually had a very interesting experience in a uh poetry group today where they were like basically saying in their poem, I'm done with people writing about themselves. Let's figure out what to do about what's happening in this world. And so it prompted me to write a poem about how we can either use our words to just you know go around in circles, or we can actually try to create a better world for ourselves and others. And that's what I want to do. You know, like that's kind of the point of the heart path is to create a better world for myself and everyone around me. And so I am so grateful to be able to talk to people like you who also see that there's light and there's hope and there's a way that we can come together to move forward. And um I would love to talk just a little bit more about your book, What the River May Bring, and know if there's any kind of events coming up where people can come and join you and hear you read, or well, I have two upcoming events.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

Um, this first one would be before this airs, but I'll just tell you because it's kind of interesting. So Boulder County Nature Association invited me to read some poetry at their ecosystem symposium that was April 4th. And they had found a poem that I had written for Summit County, Colorado, and asked, would I read that? And I was like, Well, sure, I'll read that, but I've lived in Boulder County 30 years. I'm happy to write you your own poem, you know. And they were like, Well, we don't really want to give you a big project to do. And I was like, I like a project though. So I decided, well, is there a way that I could walk across the county and write about it? So it's still, even with our record low snowpack year, it's still a little ambitious to get to the divide right now. So I cut myself a little slack with that, and I started at the Hesi Trailhead in Eldora, Colorado, which is about 8,500 feet, I think. And then I walked east down to the county line. I was section hiking it. So like I went home and slept at everything, and then somebody would drive me to the next top of the path, you know, and then I would keep walking downhill. And so I wrote a line for each mile, and so it's 47 miles, and I made a little seven-minute film of that experience and showed that at the symposium. And then a woman who was in the audience there said, Well, I run this adventure film series, and on Friday, the 17th, I'm showing this documentary about these guys in the 1970s who cross-country skied across the entire state of Colorado from like Durango to the Pooder River. And I think it would be great to pair your movie with theirs if you can go, Aaron. So this Friday I'll be showing that, which is really so fun and unexpected. And then I am reading at the Trident Cafe in Boulder April 28th from 6:30 to 7:30 in a reading called Ecology of Place, along with Rodham Markham and Ann Haven McDonnell. So two other amazing eco-poets who I'm so excited to read with. And I've also asked, tried in, I'm not sure, but my students and I put on this writing contest for kids called the Wooly Bear Writing Contest. So I've asked them if we could maybe have as our opening act before we go on our contest winners, and I'm waiting to hear back from them. So we may have some youth poets from 515 to 615 too.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

That's so cool. Yeah. Yay! Gather everyone. Wonderful. So, do you have any other events coming up this summer where people can find you?

SPEAKER_00 29:45

Yeah. So in the summer, I lead these free monthly hike and writes. So registration will come open mid to late May at wildriders.org. There'll be a form there. And so I have a different hike each month, and usually it's multi-generational, and we kind of do the same kind of things we do in class, but we'll sometimes have the more ambitious hike than we would undertake on our weekly classes, or maybe a little bit further away than we usually drive in class. And it's a chance for parents, grandparents, people not affiliated with class at all to come check it out and do some writing outside. I also will be presenting at the first Poets for Science gathering at Kent State in November. They had a call for proposals for workshops from attendees. So I will be presenting along with Bryce Myero and Maurice Beati. We're doing a generative workshop called Water Speaks, where we're going to be talking about writing with water as an ally and trying some fun techniques around that. So I would imagine a bunch of your listeners would be interested in Poets for Science and all the good work that they are doing, and they should try to come in November. I think it's an amazing slate of poets who are the main presenters there, and I'm so excited to be a little part of that.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

Definitely. That's um like exactly what I would like to do around that time.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

Yeah, check it out.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

That's been on my mind in a big way lately. So I'm glad that you're generating activities for others to write about it. Thank you. Okay, where can people find your books? Where's a good spot?

SPEAKER_00 31:46

So my book is really available anywhere. You can go to bookshop.org and buy it there, and it will benefit your local independent bookstore. That's what I would recommend. But it's also on the big guys, too, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. So what the river may bring, impressions of interior Alaska. And I'm donating all the proceeds from the sales to environmental education programs at Kayakuk National Wildlife Refuge. So I've been able to donate over $300 so far. And so far, they've bought 12 camp chairs for their middle school spring outing program. Just so fun to think about those books turning into seats for kids in the woods in Alaska, especially during this time of slashed budgets and slashed staff to have a little way to contribute back to those communities that are caretakers of the wilderness is really satisfying. Wow. I really like who you are as a person. I know I feel the same about you. I have rented fire towers twice to sleep in, but I think that's such a romantic job. I'd love to hear more about your experience there. I have seen Denali from a distance, but not been within the park. So I'd love to hear more about that too.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Yeah, I a lot of people do romanticize it, but when I was deep in it, when I was working 12 days in a row with two days off and having car issues because I was parking on a mountain for 12 days at a time, and animals were chewing the heck out of my wires on my car, so I couldn't really use my four-wheel drive to get up the mountain, which I needed. You know, like it wasn't the easiest life ever, but it was also very fulfilling to be able to do whatever I wanted with my time, you know, as long as I was still looking around for fire every 20 minutes and present, that's all I needed to do. But I worked with some great people and some not great people, and I had people around me that cared and others that didn't. And so it really makes it break. And when you were talking about smoke in Colorado, I was thinking about how I was inhaling it on the mountain because the smoke just wouldn't go away. And I was living in a tiny house with cracks.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

My first poem in that Marshall Fire manuscript because it was like, what this is the last, you know, like what more could happen when the town burns down. So it's like our latest catastrophe, half the town burning down. You know, it's just it was a very dark time then. Yeah, I brought my Marshall Fire manuscript. I might have that in car once here. Yeah, that'd be great. We could read because Ponderosa pine forests are really adapted for fire, you know, and lodgeable pine forests are adapted for stand replacing fire. So it's supposed to happen, but the local grass fire is not supposed to destroy half of the community. Yeah, yeah. How that's supposed to work.

SPEAKER_02 35:11

And that's the part that we gotta figure out.

SPEAKER_00 35:15

Okay, here it is. I found the poem that said NCAR fire, but that was just when it was happening, and I was worried that it was going to come into the city because they did evacuate for that one too, when we were still digging out from Marshall Fire. But okay, it's called Passion and Flain. Ambling along the NCAR fire, the land's gone more green than black or gray. Yes, needles have browned and bark has blackened, but there's the overall sense that the fire behaved. So unlike the twisted, charred, urban Armageddon Marshall Fire aftermath we drive by every day. It's good to sit still now in this green, burned place, to align my heart with the cleansing, renewing energy that naturally can be flame. It is possible to kindle yet not consume. And as this element teeters back into balance, my chest warms with reverence for it, like the sacred heart flanked by flame. So we don't have to hate fire, right?

SPEAKER_02 36:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:27

Like anything else. We don't have to hate it.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

Yeah. So what is your relationship with fire now?

SPEAKER_00 36:35

Um conscious concern. We have a cabin or outside of Rollinsville, Colorado. So it's an hour away, it's at 9,200 feet. It is where my heart lives now. I mean, I my body lives down here in town, but I'm up at the cabin as much as I can be. And that could so easily go up. But it's lovely to be there now. Well, I can be. So my sister was here in Louisville. And that morning she sent me a photo and was like, Wow, the California fires are so bad right now. And I looked at that smoke and thought, that is not California fire. And so I went on Facebook for our local town group and saw that the fire was already at the police station at the entrance to Old Town, the part of Louisville where we live. And I called her and was like, Our town is on fire. You need to evacuate now. And she was like, What are you talking about? Because she really had just assumed it was smoke from elsewhere. And you know, she was able to get out. My mom, my sister, and I, all of our houses were fine, but it affected the whole community to lose a thousand homes, you know. Yeah, it's like my dog's brother's home was destroyed, and my son's kindergarten teacher's home was destroyed. But we are seeing people building back, but it's not like we were able to keep all of the community intact in the wake of the fire, so it definitely has had long-lasting repercussions. So yeah, I fear it, and as a biologist, I understand its role, and I feel for all the people who were displaced. I really feel like this is our local climate change uh diaspora, you know, it's our local climate change catastrophe story.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

Yeah, and I hope that the story doesn't repeat itself and that we can find ways to fireproof and be ready for what's to come. I mean, even looking at our yard, I think, okay, yeah, we gotta clean this up and get ready for summer.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

So yeah, and Colorado is doing a bunch to really encourage fire hardening and the wildland urban interface, and that is really encouraging. And there have been a lot of workshops. Friends of Cold Creek has been offering some firewise workshops about how to make your landscaping more fireproof. So, yeah, people are definitely stepping up to try to take responsibility and help avoid another urban catastrophe like the Marshall Fire from happening again.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

Yeah, it is tragic and it's horrible to have so much loss. And I'm grateful that people survived, and right Colorado's coming together to make it a little easier to move forward with living with fire. So yeah. But anyway, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Aaron.

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Yeah, and I hope we stay connected and I'm really serious about enjoying collaboration and yes. Maybe there's something else we can do further down the road.

SPEAKER_02 40:54

That sounds great, and I love your poetry. So thank you very much for writing and for giving hope to your readers.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

Well, thank you for this platform and for connecting all of us on the heart path. Thank you. Yay.